Dangerous Domains

Could the biggest malware culprit be a tiny island territory with the smallest economy of any country in the world?

A new, free tool is promising to warn of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the World Wide Web, and a report based on its findings has pointed out the south Pacific island of Tokelau as the most hazardous place in cyberspace. A staggering 10 percent of pages ending in its ".tk" domain are malware infested.

McAfee SiteAdvisor has pegged only 4.1 percent of sites it tested as being risky, but warned that there are one billion monthly visits to sites that are not safe to surf. These sites may have content that includes spyware, spam, viruses, and browser-exploits.

Looking for safe neighborhoods to surf? You'll find them in Finland, Ireland, and (our very own) Sweden. ".Fi", ".ie", and ".se" domains were found to rank among the lowest in hosting spyware, spam and other scams.

The riskiest of large country domains were found to be Romania and Russia, meaning it might be wise to steer clear of websites ending in ".ro" and ".ru."